The present invention relates to a method of acquiring dump information of a computer system necessary for investigating the cause of fault of the computer system.
With recent improvement on a processor performance, the process amount of a program to be executed by one computer and the amount of data to be processed show a steady increase. In order for one computer system to efficiently process data, it is necessary to store a large amount of data directly in a main memory or to develop a large amount of data into a virtual memory. In order to realize this, it is necessary to expand the address spaces of the main memory and virtual memory.
Such expansion of the address spaces of the main and virtual memories increases the amount of information to be acquired to investigate the cause of fault of a system (such information is described hereinafter as dump information).
As the dump information increases, a time taken to acquire the dump information prolongs. This causes a delay of a start time when the system with fault starts again. Therefore, restart of processes is eventually delayed.
Techniques of avoiding a restart delay of a system with fault are known disclosed, for example, in JP-A-7-234808 and JP-A-10-333944.
JP-A-7-234808 discloses a method of acquiring dump information of a computer system having duplicated main memories. According to this disclosed method, when fault occurs in the system, data held in one of the duplicated main memories is used as the dump information, and the system is restarted by using the other main memory to avoid a delay of the restart of the system.
According to the technique disclosed in JP-A-10-333944, prior to restart of the system, dump information in a memory area where a kernel of an operating system is loaded is acquired. Thereafter, a program for restarting the system and a program for sequentially acquiring dump information from another memory area from which the dump information is still not acquired, are executed in parallel. If the dump information in a memory area necessary for system restart is not still acquired, the program for restarting the system restarts the system while dumping the dump information held in the memory area before using. In this manner, the technique disclosed in JP-A-10-333944 shortens the time taken to restart the system.